Writing Around, A Blog about Writers and Readers
Dialogue by Katherine Koller
I began writing for radio drama, so for me, dialogue is everything. In audio plays, the music, sound effects, and silence also contribute, but the main ingredient is dialogue. When I read fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, I’m attracted by the dialogue because that’s where the heat of the story is, and that’s where I feel closest to the characters. I’m hearing them speak. I’m witnessing what they say and, sometimes more importantly, what they don’t say. I’m listening for subtext, that layer of motivation, feeling, and thinking underneath every piece of dialogue. The subtext invites me to decide for myself both how and why characters say what they do. In this way, dialogue is a most democratic tool of writing.
Well known for Story, Robert McKee, in his second book Dialogue, breaks down dialogue into three elements, corresponding to the three concentric spheres around any character, composed of “a self within a self within a self” (Dialogue, 46). I visualize the ring on the outside as what is said and heard; the second ring inside is what is unsaid, the subtext; and the third innermost ring is the unsayable, of which the character may not be aware because it is buried deep within their unconscious. McKee claims that “fine dialogue creates a transparency” (Dialogue, 49), which to me suggests cracks to this hidden space of desire and fear; for me, noticing them is the joy of reading. As Aristotle says in his Poetics, “to learn is a lively pleasure,” and as McKee notes, “the deepest pleasure of theatregoing is learning, the sensation of seeing through the surface of behavior to the truth beneath” (Dialogue, 127). Dialogue, from its Greek roots, means “through-speech.”
For fiction, poetry, and nonfiction writers, there are many are many kinds of dialogue in the toolkit. There is dialogue spoken in scene, and there is remembered or recalled speech in the head of the character. Indirect dialogue is reported speech, either in the voice of the narrator or in the voice of a character. Sometimes a character speaks to themself either silently or out loud in monologue and sometimes directly to the reader. Thought dialogue can also be hypothetical or imagined by a character reflecting on what could have happened or what will happen. Letters, diaries, journals, phone and voicemail and email, and crowd dialogue (mass chanting, call and response, or a series of individual voices) are also forms of dialogue. Dialogue can also contain foreign languages. Signage is a form of dialogue, as are audio or audio-visual broadcast segments.
There are many ways of inscribing dialogue on the page, either with or without quotation marks, using italics or parentheticals. And dialogue is often accompanied by a physical action, or gesture, or pause, or nonverbal sounds. One way of avoiding the repetitive dialogue tag of “she said” is to split a line of dialogue into two and insert that character’s name and what she is doing, which not only identifies the speaker, but also shows the action attached to her spoken word.
The best definition I know of dialogue is that it is distilled speech. “Dialogue is not a conversation,” says Robert McKee (Story, 388). Dialogue is selective, not documentary.Dialogue is an action. Because there is subtext, dialogue is not telling but showing. David Ball says, “A human being talks in order to get what he or she wants (Backwards and Forwards, 27).” This desire is a human need, the focus of many play workshop discussions, where I have heard Colleen Murphy says, “Poetry comes out of the need to speak” and Richard van Camp goes even further: “Silence is a lie.” This is because the unsayable, the innermost ring in the character, is always bubbling up the unsaid. Sometimes, with pressure and tension, it shows through the cracks, in what is said, in dialogue.
The many purposes of dialogue include this revelation of character, and of the two engines of action: desire and fear. Age, education, experience, and class are also contained in a character’s diction, as well as their tactics to get what they want and how far they are willing to go. Dialogue raises the stakes, advances plot, action, conflict, and tension. It helps provide the world of the story, through specific character diction, which authenticates it. By temporarily removing author narration, dialogue reduces the distance between reader and character. It shows who is driving the scene and how the power shifts. Great dialogue has past, present, and future embedded within it: the motivation of the past, the present action, and future outcome are all implied. Every line of dialogue contains the story, “like a piece of DNA,” says playwright José Rivera (36 Assumptions about Writing Plays, American Theatre, Feb 2003). Dialogue provides pacing and narrative drive. The uneven line lengths of dialogue reduce the cognitive load on the reader, add blank or breathing space to the page, and vary texture. Especially with the use of poetic repetition, dialogue isolates feeling.
Dialogue, like narrative and poetry, needs redrafting as the text develops. Some of the suggestions from my mentors follow:
Slow down and write the scene moment-to-moment.
Try for one idea per line of dialogue, avoid clichés and unnecessary repetition.
Pull the string tighter on the tension.
Avoid adverbs in character tags because what is said should indicate how it is said.
Read each character’s dialogue on its own in separate edits.
Every character speaks at a specific pitch and register.
Dialogue needs to be cut to its essence.
What is already seen does not need to be said.
Feel every word and the potential emotional danger that exists in dialogue.
In dialogue, deliver the full humanity of your character.
Pay attention to personal diction or idiolect: word choice, rhythm, and word order. Say the lines out loud.
The best way to develop your ear for dialogue is to listen. Eudora Welty says: “your ears are magnets.” She suggests that our memory retains the “way things get said”: “Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have” (Paris Review Art of Fiction 47).
Ernest Hemingway gives further advice: “When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling (Selected Letters, 219).
And finally, playwright Marsha Norman adds her technique, of asking characters in her head how they would speak: “I’d get on a bus in the city because buses are filled with Mamas. I’d go to the bus, and I’d have a particular Jessie statement in my mind, and I’d ask this question. Then I would listen to see what the women on the bus would say. You can do this. You can look at someone and ask them a question in your mind and see what their answer would be” (The Interval 19 Nov 2014).
In my practice, I’ve discovered many ways of building dialogue skills. Although I have no aspirations of acting, an acting lesson helped me understand how an actor must decide on the subtext and how the writer must give space for this. If someone chooses to have a private phone call near me, I actively eavesdrop. I do talk to strangers. If I have a specific character in mind, I will also set up research interviews with people who are in similar circumstances. Often, I will write monologues for the character I wish to write about, to get the rhythm of their voice, and sometimes I’m surprised at the secrets revealed there. A character diary is also useful, especially for a long-term project, to record the scraps and bits that I hear from my character intermittently. I will also imagine how my character would respond to various situations differently from myself. I ask my character in my mind, “What do you feel? What do you really feel?”
Keep listening to your characters. Trust your ear, and your characters will reveal their heart in their own words for us all.
Suggested References:
McKee, Robert. Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for the Page, Stage, and Screen. New York: Twelve, 2016.
Weinman, Irving. Write Great Dialogue. London: John Murray Learning, 2019.
Reading for Dialogue:
Stories that contain wonderful dialogue are many. Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is almost all dialogue. So is “Thursday” by George Saunders and “The Guilded Six-Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston. “Borders” by Thomas King is full of dialogue. “Words” by Carol Shields is a story about language and the loss of it before regaining it. I appreciate poetry that contains dialogue, and two connected volumes by Nora Gould come to mind: I see my love more clearly from a distance and Selah. Creative nonfiction and memoir that contains dialogue to authenticate and locate are exemplified in Ordinary Wonder Tales, essays by Emily Urquhart.
(first published in Freelance, Spring 2024)
Jane Austen and Me by Katherine Koller
From time to time at my writing desk, I look up at a gift from one of my daughters, a framed drawing of Jane Austen facing the mint U.K. stamps of each of her six novels. Jane has been with me since my writing life began, first as a reader, a student, then as a teacher, mother, and author. I believe Austen contributes to my sense and sensibility, the balance of which makes up a species of mental wellness. She keeps me learning. She helps me teach my students and guide my daughters. Her books unite writers and readers across time and space and provide me with infinite lessons in writing.
I first read Jane Austen as a university student and recognized her as a particular voice for young women, necessary to be studied but also enjoyed. I recall “saving” two of the novels I had not yet read—Mansfield Park and Persuasion—for when I might need their steadying power and complete immersion; one became my best friend when I moved away from Edmonton to Toronto to work in publishing, and the other I read while suffering through a long-haul romantic breakup. But I needn’t have “preserved” those two books: Austen has since revealed that on every rereading, I find new relevancies to myself at any age, to the world now, and to the lives of girls and women.
When I began teaching at the University of Alberta, one of the first texts I taught was Pride and Prejudice, the most dramatic of Austen’s six, and the one that for me attempts to define romantic love. Because I have no sisters, the generative relationships of Elizabeth and Jane in Pride and Prejudice and Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility later helped me understand my daughters’ ups and downs. I recommended that my girls read Austen before they began dating and, although I was not entirely successful, one has a Most ardently tattoo.
As a writer, I continue to be engaged by Austen’s life and other writings, and the beauty, precision, and energy of her novels. I’ve reread her books in published order to track how her fiction matures and I’m a fan of a blog, Jane Austen Writing Lessons. I discovered an online bookstore, Jane Austen Books, devoted to works by and about Austen. To recall a few lines daily, for years I’ve followed Jane Austen on Twitter.
After interviewing Natalie Jenner about her novel The Jane Austen Society at the 2021 Writers’ Guild of Alberta conference, I treated myself to the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) meetings in Victoria in 2022. The sheer scale of the event—about 700 attendees and another 200 online—astonished me. I expected to find a load of academics, but those I met were mostly loyal readers.
As readers, we are cowriters with Austen, adding in our perceptions, experiences, and modern views. Many writers I know mimic her use of free indirect discourse, later termed (in How Fiction Works by James Wood) close third person, which reveals a character’s inner thoughts and feelings in the narrator’s voice. It delivers delicious dramatic irony when the reader understands more than the character. We appreciate Austen’s wit on the page. Under her authorship, we sense we are in capable hands; although there are many paths to her intentions and meaning, she is unfailingly specific. We understand that in her world, the universe unfolds as it should, that all has been examined with the utmost care, and balance is, or will eventually, be restored.
Austen’s female point of view focuses on responsible and regenerative relationships with family, friends, and in the community. Because actions always affect others, one must discern between performance and sincerity. By contributing to the general good while remaining true to the self, Austen suggests it is possible to live in both reality and joy. Despite a central theme of human ability, Austen’s novels offer a social agenda of poverty, prostitution, and slavery along with associated disruptions of loss, displacement, concealment, discrimination, and misinformation. Thoughtful discussion and debate, reading and rereading, wise advice, reflection, and keen observation are navigation tools in the female kit during a time when how a woman afforded to live, never mind write, depended on men.
Jane Austen posits that home is a “real comfort,” walking and being “under the trees” is restorative, and words, especially written words, have radiating power. Just as her characters learn about themselves, especially when they are in love or think they are, so do we. Austen believes in the human spirit, the possibility of contentment, the value of watching, listening, thinking, feeling and, above all, the consideration of others. We study how to close read those around us and examine ourselves, how to be open and honest, stand up for what we know is true, and respond to unacceptable behaviour. Austen shows that to laugh is essential and to always look for humour.
A sticky note on my computer monitor proffers Austen’s self-encouragement: “I am not at all in humour for writing; I must write on till I am.” Austen was not treated favourably by publishers; her first novel Pride and Prejudice was turned down. But she kept on. She read her work aloud to her family and friends, one of the best methods I know for refining text. She wrote the first draft of Emma in three months. She revised her work for years. And 200 years later, without her knowledge or benefit, Jane Austen reaches far beyond her “little square of ivory” with spinoffs, fanfiction, film adaptations, and reinterpretations of her novels, including the lavish Sanditon television series.
As a first-timer at the JASNA meetings, knowing no one, I stood in a hall or gathering place for no more than 60 seconds before someone approached me. And every time, we talked about Jane Austen. It was a wonder to be with so many others who know and love the books like me. I met an Australian scholar who was born in Edmonton and gave a scintillating keynote on the various duels in Sense and Sensibility. Later, an elegant woman in Regency costume and hair, with her husband also outfitted and pushing a clothing rack filled with period ensembles for the weekend, said, “Jane taught me how to read, but also to sew.” At dinner, a marriage therapist, there with her librarian sister, confided that she joined the group after her female clients told her that when they feel low, they turn to Jane Austen. The sisters had presented on Austen bibliotherapy at a previous conference, and encouraged me to submit my proposal to JASNA 2023. At the closing reception, I met attendees from Calgary, who invited me to try out my talk for their chapter of the Jane Austen Society.
Austen has more in store for me, as I reflect on my notes for her definition of love, think about adapting one of her novels for the stage, and go back to her books for company, consolation, guidance, lessons in writing, and inspiration.
(first published in Westword, vol. 43, no. 1, Jan-March 2023)
The Fine Details with Anita Rau Badami by Katherine Koller
In her talk , Anita Rau Badami confessed that she “could not imagine a life without words” despite her other pursuit, visual art, albeit “a road not taken.” To her, writing is “always a journey, a mystery” while her visual art is confined to space, color, figure, forms. The author of The Hero’s Walk, Tell it to the Trees, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? and Tamarind Mem, Anita is a Canada Reads winner and the recipient of the Marion Engel Award and the Commonwealth Prize. Perhaps as a result of her own visual art practice, Anita’s novels are known for distinct details. She will often paint her characters in preparation for writing them.
Her writing process is first laying down fragments in notebooks. Then she lifts segments from the notebooks on to her computer, adding connective tissue, deleting material that doesn’t propel the story, and shaping it into a structure only at the end of the novel’s development. I was surprised to learn that the magnificent turtle scene, which ends The Hero’s Walk, was moved from the beginning of the novel to the end at the last moment!
For Anita, “writing is how to work out the tension between two places,” India and Canada, and makes her feel that she belongs in both: “This is who I am. I don’t apologize for it.” Her ideas come from listening and watching people. The tiniest moment or bit of conversation can generate a whole novel. She never throws any material away, and simply crosses off each notebook entry when it is used in a novel.
In her workshop, Anita began with her version of “the deal” between writer and reader: “The writer will make the reader believe their lies so readers can pretend they are in the heart of truth.” Therefore, the details of fiction must enhance interest, ground in a scene, evoke place and mood, engender memory and feeling, sustain reader engagement, provide an instant image and, most important, a sensory and emotional response.
After examining examples from contemporary fiction, Anita gave writing exercises. The first was to write a visual description without dialogue of three kinds of kitchens: warm and welcoming, cold and dreary, and threatening. Each kitchen, however, needed the same five given details: a stone floor, a table, a sink full of pots, a clock ticking or other sound and smells of cooking.
In her handout, Anita provided an extensive tip sheet along with many examples and exercises for further exploration. Her tips on detail are about choice: what, when, whose pov; be specific but make room for the reader to add their own details; vary sentence structure, put detail in action, use description to characterize; and avoid overdoing it. She emphasizes that because detail can slow down a scene, take care to describe only when the description serves more than one purpose.
The next exercise was a list of external or physical details about a character, and a list of internal details, the ones you remember about someone. To follow this, we wrote a paragraph about that character. And finally, we wrote a character into one of our kitchen scenes from the first exercise.
Anita’s final notes are to reveal setting through motion rather than still life. Use active verbs and less adjectives to set the scene. In the same way, setting can be enhanced by the character’s perspective because what the character knows and feels influences what she sees. In this way, setting details can actually show contrasts and progressions in character. Equally important is what the character doesn’t see. Details can also be turned into metaphors, as in this example from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: “Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.” Ultimately, details will set the tone for a story, and will cast a lasting impression on the reader.
(First published in The Branch Line, December 2016)
Learning to Wright with Vern Thiessen by Katherine Koller
Vern Thiessen began his talk “Writing v. Wrighting” (September 30, 2016) by claiming that “playwrights are plankton on the literary food chain,” yet he’s spent twenty-five years at it, winning (among many others), a Governor-General’s Award (Einstein’s Gift), the CAA-sponsored Carol Bolt Award (Vimy) and a Dora Mavor Moore Award for his adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel, Of Human Bondage.
He relocated to New York for seven years “to up his game,” which resulted in hundreds of productions of his plays around the world. Now happily back in Edmonton, he is Artistic Director of Workshop West Theatre as well as a playwright with many commissions. The turning point for him was an elevator ride at age 35 with a man who collapsed (unknown to Vern at the time, the man survived). In this carpe diem moment, Thiessen decided to quit his day job at the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and commit to playwriting.
He soon learned that there are three levels of commitment for playwrights: a personal one, where writing is for fun, love and practice; the artistic stage, where the story must be told or the telling of it explores new form and craft; and the professional level, writing plays to a deadline for performance, for payment. Vern needs to know what he’s building, and what stage he’s at with each play, every time. This way he can manage expectations and goals, as a play moves from one level to another.
Vern emphasizes that playwrights write for the actor’s voice. His stage directions, to designers and directors, are minimal and written to inspire, not prescribe. He prefers playwriting because he has control of the property, the written text, but not the production, which is “different in interpretation nightly.” For Vern, the excitement of the “chess game” of playwriting is expressed by British playwright David Hare: “The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.”
Vern concluded his evening presentation with a reading from his play Lenin’s Embalmers and a three-pronged challenge to the audience: What needs to be written about? Who needs a voice? What world do we need to see?
In his Saturday morning session the next day, Vern explained his practice, developed over years, to release the individual voice. First we all completed the following three sentences: A play is . . . A play must . . . A play must never . . . This gave us an idea of our own and our shared understanding of what a play does.
Next, Vern walked us through the six Aristotelian elements of a play: plot (what), character (who), theme (why), dialogue (how), rhythm or song (how), and setting (where and when). To make sure we all understood the difference between plot (how a story is told) and story (what happens), we did an exercise giving five, active and chronological events of the story of The Titanic. Then we examined the plot of the movie Titanic, noting the difference of ordering the story events for dramatic purpose.
A rapid, timed exercise on making ten story points in a group was revealing because no one had time to think, the events spilled out on the page and all we had to do was put them in chronological order. Then we were asked to decide what the story was about, to show how in playwriting the theme emerges after the story is laid down.
Vern also gave a monologue exercise, noting that monologues are to oneself, to another or to the audience. In a monologue, there is a decision to be made, a struggle under consideration, in the present (“To be or not to be”).
Next we all wrote two pieces of dialogue from prompts. Vern showed the importance of punctuation in dialogue by demonstrating the difference with a simple word, hi, when preceded by ellipses, or followed by a period, question or exclamation marks.
Vern’s developmental technique for each scene answers this question: if you only have eight lines, what are they? This exercise promotes compression, meaning, essence.
Finally, we all wrote a scene. In this workshop lasting only two and a half hours, the scene was our seventh writing exercise! Before we began, we answered six questions: how the play looks, tastes, feels, sounds, smells and what it’s about. This gave us a chance to construct the world of the play in our sensory imaginations before trying to write what happens.
I asked Vern how he writes five plays at any one time, all in different stages of development. He replied that he takes extensive notes at the end of each part of the process for each play because it may be some time before he has a chance to return to it. When he does, he reassesses the world of the play by doing the same exercises he gave us: going through the five story points, the ten story points, the eight-line scene sketches, the look/taste/feel/sound/ smell of the play world. He re-examines what he thinks the play is about over and over. The notes from before and the reassessment of the world of the play then define the plan for the “re-wright” of the script.
(First published in The Branch Line, October 2016)
Fear of Fiction with Gail Anderson-Dargatz by Katherine Koller
“Getting your Work Noticed” was the subject of a Friday night talk by Gail Anderson-Dargatz. The key to book promotion for Gail, author of six books of literary fiction, comes from being a farmer’s daughter: “community is everything” and “never go anywhere without a gift.” Even though Gail recently completed a three-month Random House book tour, she believes that the responsibility to promote the book begins with the author. For her part, she posted about every event, every success and tick up the bestseller lists in social media. But, she stresses, the time comes when you can’t only talk about yourself and your own book online; when your turn is over, celebrate the work of the other writers in your community, and your community will, in turn, celebrate yours.
Besides sending out a single email to friends to let them know about her new book, Gail uses social media to give recommendations of other writers’ work and asks other authors to be guest bloggers on her website. Hand sales, where a reader hands someone a book saying “You need to read this,” now manifest in online reader reviews and blogs. “If your book is great, the readers themselves will promote it,” she says in “Promoting Your Book” on her website (www.gailanderson-dargatz.ca).
Gail also gets readers to notice her books with personally-crafted gifts including homemade paper bookmarks and oatcakes for The Cure for Death by Lightning, individual honey pots for A Recipe for Bees, and postcards for The Spawning Grounds. Some other advice is to participate in writers’ festivals, give workshops at libraries and speak at clubs and gatherings as a way to network, build a reading community and get paid at the same time.
On her Saturday workshop, Gail asked the very full room of writers for their fears about writing fiction. The responses filled an entire whiteboard. Next, she went through each and every fear, giving strategies from her own experience with the very same anxiety, and asked for other solutions from the floor. This made the workshop, which she titled “Writing Home,” more of a dialogue than a presentation. Some of the fears dissected include finishing a long project (“structure will save you”), the tyranny of research (“don’t stick to the facts”), beginning hell (“trust your craft”), what will mom think? (transform fact to fiction) and the fear of cultural appropriation (Margaret Atwood said, “It’s only a short step from saying we can’t write from the point of view of an ‘other’ to saying we can’t read that way either, and from there to the position that no one can really understand anyone else. . . . Surely the delight and wonder come not from who tells the story but from what the story tells, and how”).
Gail also had many tips about writing that will eventually become a writing guide, Fifty Things about Writing I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Wrote This Fucking Novel, which she calls “against the grain advice”:
Write the story first, then do research.
“Cook” anecdotes into story. (Anecdotes are single happenings without consequences; story answers “what if” with “why” while anecdotes simply describe.)
Interview subjects for fiction.
Fictional characters are not real people, but larger than life.
Don’t write about your own kids.
Structure will help find meaning.
Doodle your structure before writing.
Pay yourself first in writing time: make it early in the day and make it a habit.
Make writing play, not work.
Write crap (to combat perfectionism, investigate, experiment).
Focus on scene: action, dialogue and beats (emotional turns).
Let characters tell you who they are (rather than listing their cv before you begin).
Create a “well file” for discarded material.
“Follow the heat” of what interests you.
Use genre templates to help structure your novel (screenplay, gothic, romance, thriller).
Avoid over-isolation.
When you hit a wall, be hyperaware and ready for synchronicity and solutions.
Learn about what is working from editors’ comments.
If you face burnout, make changes to how you work, and continue on.
Besides being a best-selling novelist, Gail is also a writing mentor and writing camp leader. On her website, she listed thirteen articles especially for our workshop about story, the writing program Scrivener, turning real life into fiction, act structure, character desire and getting a book deal. A common problem she sees in the work of writers she coaches (and even in her own work at early stages) is protecting the protagonist. If a protagonist is passive, they cannot act or speak. They are paralyzed, and relegated to listening and reporting about action given to secondary characters or in flashback. Characters must act on conflict rather than talk about it; “chase your characters up a tree and throw rocks at them,” Gail says. Another common problem is that some authors record a description of an object in a museum or a landmark they’ve visited directly onto the page rather than integrating this research into an active scene.
In our day with Gail we did one exercise, the interview. This revealed how quickly we could find out what matters to each other, by sharing commonalities and life histories in an informal way. One writer said, “we both came out of the interview with something – a gift to each other.” For interviews, Gail suggests that writers ask to talk about their project in progress, practice a waiting silence, leave room for “what if” and watch for patterns that will lead to truths. Meet people in their home if possible, for their own ease and comfort and for the details of their physical environment. “Most people want to tell their story,” says Gail. In so doing, they reveal about themselves sometimes what even they didn’t know before. The interview can be an act of self-discovery or realization.
The second exercise, “Blind Cat” was a take-home challenge from The Writer’s Gym by Eliza Clark. Pretend you’re a blind cat in a new experience; engage your other senses and memory to let go and even embarrass yourself a little to see how it feels.
Other resources recommended by Gail are A Passion for Narrative by Jack Hodgins and a blog, Terribleminds by Chuck Wendig.
(This piece first appeared in The Branch Line, January 2017.)
Conversation to DIALOGUE
by Katherine Koller
Here are the sources for some quotes used in my presentation on Conversation to DIALOGUE, and also some notes for further study.
What is Dialogue?
“Dialogue is not a conversation.” –Robert McKee
“Like a painting, not a photo.” –David Hare“
“Dialogue is the distillation of human speech.” (Unknown)
“To say is to do.” –Robert McKee
“Dialogue is what characters do to each other.” –Elizabeth Bowen
“A human being talks in order to get what he or she wants.” –David Ball
“Dialogue is like a competition, with each person determined to stop the other person from getting what she wants.” –Jack Hodgins
“Poetry comes out of the need to speak.” –Coleen Murphy
“Silence is a lie.” –Richard van Camp
“Think of your ears as magnets.” –Eudora Welty
Functions of dialogue:
Reveals character and desire/fear.
Advances plot.
Reveals a purpose.
Performs an action, a tactic.
Puts us in the moment.
Shows conflict.
Provides subtext.
Lets the character speak without author intrusion.
Reduces distance between character and reader.
Authenticates.
Provides tension.
Illuminates desire.
Hangs a lantern on the story.
Raises the stakes.
Gives the world (of the play).
Shows whose story it is
Every line of dialogue says (the play). “Like a piece of DNA” –José Rivera
Shows what has already occurred and what may occur. Has past, present and future in it.
Provides pacing., narrative drive.
Dialogue contains needed information, to be doled out only when necessary.
In fiction, reduces density of the page/cognitive load with white space.
Isolates feeling, especially with poetic repetition.
Attached to action/reflection
Ambiguity invites audience to decide.
Suggests given circumstances
Ways to Develop your Ear for Dialogue:
Observe, Remember,
Eavesdrop, Listen to interviews, Listen to strangers.
Take notes, Read dialogue aloud.
See and read plays and screenplays.
Hear radio drama and podcasts.
Ride buses and subways.
Put everything in the hopper.
Listen to your character, Record bits you hear, Write character monologues.
Be a sponge, then compress, Feel every word.
Sources:
Robert McKee. Dialogue. 2016.
Robert McKee. Story. 1997. “Dialogue is not a conversation.”
Rib Davis. Writing Dialogue for Scripts. 2008.
Fred Stenson. Things Feigned or Imagined: The Craft in Fiction. 2002.
CHARACTER
Character: Instrument for marking or graving, impress, stamp; distinctive mark, distinctive nature; a distinctive mark, evidence or token; to make sharp, cut furrows in, engrave;a feature, trait, characteristic. [OED]
Charcter is action. –-Aristotle
You have to think of the character as escaping into life rather than from it. –Jim Harrison
It takes six human beings to make a character. –-Somerset Maugham
We are an animal which, when cornered, becomes eloquent.
–Graham Greene
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. –Oscar Wilde
I had trouble writing the Mama parts, and when I would get socked in I’d get on a bus in the city because buses are filled with Mamas. I’d go to the bus and I’d have a particular Jessie statement in my mind, and I’d ask this question. Then I would listen to see what the women on the bus would say. You can do this. You can look at someone and ask them a question in your mind and see what their answer would be. -–Marsha Norman
What do you love, what do you hate? Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something with all his heart. . .The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story. –Ray Bradbury
There may be no more important question to ask of a character than: What does she want in this scene, in this chapter, in this story? Thinking more globally, one should ask what she wants from her life — has she achieved it? If not, why not? If so, what now? — David Corbett, The Art of Character
In the absence of desires, stories remain stillborn. This reflects a simple truth: Desire puts a character in motion. –Peter Brooks, Reading for Plot
The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them. — Vladimir Nabokov
The strongest principle of human growth lies in human choice.
— George Eliot
Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions – what we do – that we are happy or the reverse….All human happiness and misery take the form of action. –Aristotle